[HN Gopher] Margaret Mead, technocracy, and the origins of AI's ...
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Margaret Mead, technocracy, and the origins of AI's ideological
divide
Author : benbreen
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-11-21 14:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| tgv wrote:
| Mead was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long
| debate. Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had
| already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in
| the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today. While
| both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's techno-bros is
| a bit of a stretch.
| sctb wrote:
| > Mead was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long
| debate.
|
| Yes, this is how voices work.
|
| > Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had already
| lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the
| 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.
|
| Are you making this argument simply based on the passage of
| time? I can think of a lot of ideas whose longevity makes 90
| years seem a sneeze.
|
| > While both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's
| techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
|
| If they share a mindset, would that not be an obvious link?
| Additionally, this article is drawing a connection not just
| between Mead and techno-optimists (not the same as tech-bros),
| but between Mead and both techno-optimism and existential risk.
| That's sort of what the article's preamble describes as the
| interesting thing.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Why are you so intent on linking this woman to modern tech
| workers?
| dmead wrote:
| I'm a tech bro.
| terminous wrote:
| > Mead was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long
| debate. Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had
| already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut
| in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.
| While both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's techno-
| bros is a bit of a stretch.
|
| Plato was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long
| debate. Whatever people were thinking 2000+ years ago, it had
| already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut
| in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.
| While both may share a mindset, linking Plato to today's
| techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
|
| The allegory of the cave still has resonance today. Abstract
| ideas are timeless. That's the point of abstraction.
| tgv wrote:
| But Plato gets taught, and these writings by Mead don't.
| Linking Plato to tech-bros is indeed a stretch.
| gotorazor wrote:
| This is kinda how history of ideas work. People just kind
| of think they think and know things independently from
| within themselves or something.
|
| Historians who study the origins of idea traces them back
| and make connections to thoughts and ideas of the past.
| Often, the inheritors of those ideas knows nothing of how
| they get them and think themselves clever for coming up
| with them all by themselves.
| nearbuy wrote:
| This is unfalsifiable speculation though. I could make
| that claim about anyone (eg, I could say actually it was
| H. G. Wells planted the seeds of techno-optimism in the
| present day AI community) and you would have no way to
| prove me wrong.
|
| Remove Margaret Mead from the timeline and the AI camps
| today would probably be the exact same. Those are
| basically the two options with anything in life that's
| both useful and dangerous: optimism or pessimism, hope or
| fear.
| tgv wrote:
| True, but that trace here is missing. There is no link
| apart from "Mead said something vaguely utopian", and
| that doesn't even seem specific for technology. In 1939,
| technology was not the most threatening thing.
| _glass wrote:
| Laughs in Cultural Studies. Seriously, Mead is an integral
| part of the curriculum in the social sciences.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| As someone with a degree in a social science whose entire
| contact with Mead was outside of that study, I think you
| are at least overgeneralizing.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > AI's societal debut in the 1980s
|
| The debut would seem to be at least 1968, with HAL9000's
| starring role in _2001: A Space Odyssey_.
|
| (If you watch it now, you will see that Arthur C. Clarke and
| Stanley Kubrick made a film that is right on-target today. Even
| the most prominent feature of their 1968 fictional AI is its
| polite, conversational, very human output and input - and some
| very bad analysis.)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| We failed when we killed Cybernetics and AI became part of
| Computer Science instead of the multidisciplinary field it
| actually is
|
| Weiner was an outspoken socialist and was persecuted for it, to
| such an extent that Cybernetics got needled to death and AI
| became "simply a matter of computing."
|
| Hopefully we all see now how wrong that was
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Yep. If we don't get paperclipped then we're getting
| collectively BORG'ed. Free will? More like a tool by the system
| that controls the information reality around you.
| benbreen wrote:
| Author here. Thank you, I thought this was an interesting
| point. Researching the book this post is based on, I was really
| struck by who was actually attending the Macy cybernetic
| conferences -- it was incredibly eclectic. Anthropologists,
| physiologists, psychiatrists... and, of course, also Claude
| Shannon and von Neumann.
|
| Carving off computer science as a separate realm with less
| interdisciplinary input was definitely a fork in the road for
| the history of science.
|
| By the way, if anyone is interested, you can find the list of
| cybernetics conference attendees here: https://www.asc-
| cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeop...
|
| And if anyone is _really_ interested, here 's my book, which is
| coming out in January:
| https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/benjamin-breen/trip...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Awesome. Glad to see there's other people out there that care
| and understand that "AI" fully understood, is marginally
| about the computer, and primarily about society.
| gopher_space wrote:
| I'm just waiting to see who starts hiring English majors
| first. I'll join or invest.
| mistermann wrote:
| I've always assumed the various three letter agencies
| would need those sorts of people but I've never looked
| into it...I definitely agree with you though.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Isn't 'Cognitive Science' (at least as I remember it) about
| bringing together again all those domains?
| Zolde wrote:
| Yes, but the focus is more on human cognition, where
| cybernetics has more focus on (business, complex, control)
| systems, (automated, biological) processes, and human
| collectives.
|
| It is interesting how cognitive science sees AI as a sub-
| discipline, where AI sees cognitive science as its sub-
| discipline.
|
| McCarthy was not too enamoured with the bombastic nature of
| Wiener's persona and research, and may have birthed the
| field of AI, in part, to carve out his own field of study,
| and move away from an existing and defined field. As a
| result, control theory and reinforcement learning have a
| big overlap, yet use different words, approaches, and
| concepts.
| jprete wrote:
| Interesting. I always thought of cybernetics as robot
| hands and such, but your description of it is exactly the
| thing I am most interested in right now.
| justincormack wrote:
| This article about the Ratio Club cybernetics meetings in
| London is interesting
| http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~philh/pubs/Ratio2.pdf
| dekhn wrote:
| BTW the only CS class I took in college (in the mid-90s) was
| called Cybernetics, taught by Huffman (a Wiener disciple) and I
| can't say it had anything to do with AI at all; it was all
| control theory and information theory (compression, message
| integrity, boolean circuit design). I see it as complementary
| to ML in CS. Personally I took the class to learn how to make
| robots and was very disappointed we didn't cover that.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Sounds like you learned a lot about AI actually :)
|
| Especially for the time
| tgv wrote:
| In the 90s, we taught neural networks, and statistical
| machine learning in AI. Cybernetics (as a term) had been
| out of fashion for decades by then, if only because it was
| taken to be how Wikipedia describsed it: the study of
| "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and
| social systems" and was the domain of applied mathematics
| and PDEs, whereas neural networks weren't even recurrent.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, I learned about ML in another way: working with a CS
| professor who worked on ML at the time. This was back in
| the days when autodifferentiation was not well known, so we
| had to come up with analytic derivatives of our loss
| function to do gradient descent.
|
| What I learned in Cybernetics was really: how prefix-free
| codes work (unsurprising given that Huffman was the
| instructor), how karnaugh maps work, and something about
| sphere packing being easy in 8 dimensions. Oh, and that
| Huffman was an arrogant jerk but also an excellent teacher.
| gkew wrote:
| I agree and feel sad for the vanishing of Cybernetics.
|
| Transdisciplinary fields are usually more delicate; they're
| often the momentary confluences of scientifically-inclined
| humanists and prominent scientific fields of their time. Before
| cybernetics there was various ambitious/systematic
| philosophy/evolution crossovers like Herbert Spencer.
|
| From what I've researched and worked with individuals on the
| edge of the field, the contemporary debates seems to be going
| for "Second-order cybernetics"
|
| Possible resources of interest are "IEEE Transactions on
| Cybernetics" (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?r
| eload=true&...), as well as the work of Hugh Dubberly (Apple
| II, DNS) from Dubberly Design Office.
| alekseiprokopev wrote:
| Ironically enough, the people who followed Weiner's work were
| persecuted in the USSR.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If you say you can use fancy maths to make tanks roll faster
| off the assembly lines, or guide an ICBM towards
| Moscow/Washington, then the regime will happily support you.
| But if you get in your head that you can apply the same fancy
| math to run the economy, the regime will object - obviously -
| and label you as too communist/not communist enough, and
| persecute you/ship you off to a gulag.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| I dont understand why you get down voted. Economics are
| ultimately about physical power and any new emerging model
| is a thread to the dominant power structure aka the current
| model.
|
| The conflicting models were the origin of the cold war
| (capitalism vs communism) and today between china and the
| west.
| brutusborn wrote:
| Isn't China essentially capitalist now? The main
| difference in my mind is authoritarianism vs liberalism.
| paganel wrote:
| I've left a related comment somewhere else in in the thread,
| but it's interesting that here in neighbouring Romania the
| practice/science of Cybernetics was quite well regarded
| almost until the communist government fell.
|
| Its heyday had certainly been back in the '70s, as in the
| '80s the focus shifted to some other stuff thanks to energy
| inputs getting too expensive and us becoming bankrupt because
| of that (someone should write a history of the alternative
| energy sources tried by the communist government back then,
| some of which are now getting tested by the West, too), but
| for sure people weren't getting sent to prison because of it.
|
| Here's [1] a list of Cybernetics-related books published
| before 1989 that I can find at an old-books store here in
| Bucharest, and that search reminded me that one of the main
| proponents of Cybernetics around these parts was Manea
| Manescu [2], a guy which had been prime-minister of communist
| Romania in the '70s (just before that he had been in charge
| of the State Planning Committee) and who stood by Ceausescu's
| side until the very end (that list of books I linked to
| includes a book with his name on it).
|
| [1] https://www.targulcartii.ro/cauta/cibernetica?filter_name
| =ci...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manea_M%C4%83nescu
| justincormack wrote:
| The book How not to Network a Nation is good on this history
| kkylin wrote:
| "Weiner" should be Wiener?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
| classified wrote:
| _Wiener_
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Wait... unless I'm missing a lot here, the concrete parts of
| cybernetics became known as control theory (and the more wishy-
| washy parts are known as "systems thinking"), and in both
| cases, the _primary idea_ behind it all is exactly to turn
| dynamic problems into "simply a matter of computing".
|
| That's literally what the whole thing is about - you model a
| problem as a bunch of cybernetics/control theory equations
| (with or without helper diagrams of boxes and arrows), do some
| _computing_ on it, and implement the result in the physical
| world. In many cases, the computational model is partially
| included in the result itself - the physical control system
| includes a _computer_ (whether it 's an analog or digital one)
| that keeps the physical system stable _by means of computation_
| , i.e. "simply a matter of computing".
|
| (In general, I feel many people didn't get the memo:
| "computing" isn't something "techbros" do; computing is a
| fundamental part of how we understand the world works - up
| there with energy conservation, thermodynamics, etc.)
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Yeah, feels like this discussion takes the "computer" part
| too serious when talking about computer science. Computing
| isn't necessarily something with a computer. CompSci is about
| solving problems in general. I'd argue that we just went the
| normal way a science does. You start by having everyone
| involved, then you narrow down and focus. In CompSci, focus
| isn't really what's happening though, as it got broader and
| broader. The core principle (solving problems) still remains.
| We'll probably see a split down the line as well.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Penrose disagrees!
| BanTheBastards wrote:
| Penrose is obviously wrong and has been repeatedly
| criticized for his shoddy thinking when it comes to
| cognition.
| paganel wrote:
| For what it's worth Cybernetics did try to have a second life
| here in Eastern Europe going into the '70s and even past that,
| but the US/Silicon Valley pull was too powerful and by the '90s
| all of that had been left in the past (the communist
| governments here falling at the end of the '80s didn't help, of
| course).
|
| I'm from Bucharest myself, and I live just a couple of blocks
| away from an institution called the Faculty of Cybernetics,
| meaning the computer-focused faculty of the local
| school/university of economics.
|
| If I'm not mistaken, and I hope that I'm not, it had been set
| up sometime in the early '70s when many of the technocracy
| higher-ups in here were really into Cybernetics and into
| Wiener's works (some of which had been translated before
| Ceausescu fell, so when the communists were still in power).
| Most, if not all, of those technocrats were not engineers and
| also not "classical" computer-science people, afaik the
| majority of them were economists.
|
| But, as a I said, when the '90s came the "classical" computer-
| science paradigm (and especially the engineering-focused part)
| took off for good, so that all that "side-quest" about
| Cybernetics was left in the past (apart from the some entities
| still being attached to it only by name).
|
| The same can be said about the concept of linear programming as
| applied to economics and to economic forecasting, that is a
| quite cool concept that had been almost completely forgotten
| starting with the '90s but which now is having a small
| resurgence (I've "re-discovered" it myself by first reading
| about it in Schumpeter's _History of Economic Analysis_ and
| then by going through a Soviet dictionary of economics
| published sometime in the '70s).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Indeed I studied computational economics because that's the
| closest we get to Cybernetics today IMO
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The article references Hugo Gernsback - and one of the best
| literary criticisms of the techno-optimist utopia ideal can be
| found in William Gibson's short story, "The Gernsback Continuum".
|
| As far as the 'ideological divide' at OpenAI, the fact that
| they're all silent about the military contracting arm of their
| partner Microsoft as well as potential applications of LLMs to
| the military arena should be proof enough that their 'do-gooder'
| PR operation is nothing more than a branding and marketing game.
|
| I suppose you could argue that military dominance of the planet
| in the name of do-gooder agendas is just what we need, but that's
| always been little more than a justification for robbery of
| others, ever since the dawn of recorded history.
| c54 wrote:
| What're some of the military applications of LLMs?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Influence ops, propaganda, etc
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Propaganda - now any language on earth. Coming soon -
| personalized with the voice of your loved ones, voice
| application are currently happily harvesting.
| kombookcha wrote:
| I strongly feel that this is where the really destructive
| potential of military LLM applications lies. We've already
| seen examples of faked images, voice clips and videos being
| disseminated of prominent political figures. It's not
| difficult to imagine a well planned disinfo attack could
| paralyse or misdirect the political apparatus and public
| sentiment of a state during some critical moment in time
| (IE, during a coup attempt or invasion).
|
| Everyone might be able to work out which snippets of media
| were true and which were not in a few days, but if it
| happens during a crisis point the loss of time and momentum
| could be catastrophic.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| One high priority for the military has been using AIs to
| analyze massive volumes of data. A common example is
| analyzing satellite photos for interesting objects.
|
| They say the want to output a shortlist to aid human
| decision-making, but of course they might decide to skip that
| step.
| Qwertious wrote:
| AIUI, a Javelin missile (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin ) works by
| pointing its camera at your target and holding it in-frame
| there for a few seconds while the missile learns what your
| target looks like well enough to home in on it once launched.
|
| I imagine the Pentagon would pay billions for an LLM that
| could shave a couple of seconds off that target-acquisition
| time.
| Merrill wrote:
| Technology that may cause existential risk or risk of systemic
| collapse are one category including nuclear weapons, engineered
| pathogens, global warming, etc.
|
| Robotics disrupting the workforce and devaluing labor are another
| category continuing the process of mechanization and automation
| that started with small electrical motors and the electrification
| of factories.
|
| Artificial intelligence is in a third category because it
| threatens the disruption and impending devaluation of broad
| categories of intellectual work.
| progne wrote:
| You're listing sources of systemic collapse, but perhaps the
| greater danger is the reverse: Ilya Sutskever's fear that it
| has "the potential to create infinitely stable dictatorships."
|
| We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability,
| and a cheap source of intelligence threatens to shift the
| ground one way or the other.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and
| stability
|
| Citation needed? If that were true I would expect a long
| history of alternating societal growth and collapse. That
| doesn't seem to be generally true?
| progne wrote:
| See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, for a
| discussion in depth. It's a property of all life. I think
| of it as a zone between inanimate and immolated. We need
| energy flow to live, but too much kills.
| brutusborn wrote:
| I guess it's true if you look far enough back to the Bronze
| Age collapse or the growth and collapse of various empires.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I can think of just two examples in western history: Late
| Bronze Age collapse and the decline of Rome. Current
| scholarly belief is that both are the result of not well
| documented (being prehistorical) immigration pressures
| due to conquest at the fringe of empire, and/or a climate
| induced famine double-whammy. The idea of "internal
| societal collapse" has fallen out of favor.
| lhoff wrote:
| I think the best summary of the whole devise that I came across
| is this one from today
|
| > ,,The OpenAI tussle is between the faction who think Skynet
| will kill them if they build it, and the faction who think Roko's
| Basilisk(,s Monster)will torture them if they don't build it hard
| enough."
|
| Source: https://mastodon.social/@jef/111443214445962022
| concinds wrote:
| Except the people who worry about Roko's Basilisk are the same
| faction as those who believe paperclip maximizers will kill
| everyone. The "other side" isn't part of this semi-cult, and
| nor do they believe in zero-safety.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Some of us do wish for zero-safety.
| Sirizarry wrote:
| Very interesting article on a figure I've never really read
| about. Timely too with all the EA drama. I look forward to
| reading the book
| gnarlouse wrote:
| > [Sam] Altman's dismissal by OpenAI's board on Friday was the
| culmination of a power struggle between the company's two
| ideological extremes--one group born from Silicon Valley techno
| optimism... the other steeped in fears that AI represents an
| existential risk to humanity and must be controlled with extreme
| caution.
|
| Wait, I thought Altman got canned because he was starting
| businesses behind the board's back making conflicts of interest.
| ben_w wrote:
| The exact reason was (is?) obscured by the board saying nothing
| publicly beyond "lack of candour", we've all been trying to
| guess in the meantime.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The real reason is that Agents of Eliezer stabbed him in the
| back (metaphorically), and they did it so smoothly that I
| can't even credit them with this - nobody will believe me.
| johngossman wrote:
| Another thread of intellectual history: the EA people who tend to
| speak most loudly about AI safety (two of them are on OpenAI's
| board) owe much to the writings of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit,
| leading quickly back to GE Moore; the engineers owe a lot to
| Turing, and the computational linguists to Chomsky. You can
| quickly go through Turing and Chomsky to GE Moore's classmate and
| friend Bertrand Russell. It's like six degrees of Russell and
| Moore. Or six degrees of Sidgwick and Frege if you want to go
| back a little further. And so on...
| Zolde wrote:
| EA is basically Christian charity for people who live in a city
| that views Christianity as a dirty thing.
|
| It is employed to resolve the cognitive dissonance that highly
| talented people struggle with, when they realize they could do
| anything they set their minds to (including making the world a
| better place), but still want to work as a quant or optimize
| for ad clicks, because this pays well.
|
| Like Goedel stated "most religions are bad, but religion is
| not", most people vocally identifying with EA are bad, but EA
| is not. To judge EA by the character flaws of prominent people
| like SBF, is like judging Christianity for Jim Jones's
| massacre. EA is, in essence, about effectively allocating
| charity. Noble and good-hearted.
|
| Surely, grifters and frauds would abuse EA to virtue signal or
| trick venture capitalists into thinking their investment also
| builds wells in Africa. That should reflect badly on them.
| Elizabeth Holmes got so far, in part, because venture
| capitalists were attracted to her due to her being a young
| female. Merely Goodhart's Law in progress, not young female
| entrepreneurs being bad or without merit.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > EA is basically Christian charity for people who live in a
| city that views Christianity as a dirty thing.
|
| I don't see it. They're pretty much opposite approaches.
|
| Christianity is deontological and focused on God.
| Christianity says that's what is important is following the
| rules, and the rules exist to make God happy, and that
| outcomes are irrelevant.
|
| EA is an utilitarian frame work, and focused on the real
| world. Utilitarianism says what is important is obtaining
| utility, and that outcomes are the ultimate measure of
| goodness.
|
| The main difference is that from an utilitarian standpoint,
| Christian charity only ever works by accident. From its point
| of view what's important is that you do it. The how and why,
| and what happens as a result is unimportant. So giving huge
| amounts of money to a megachurch for the pastor's Ferrari
| while the poor starve is perfectly fine, because you're not
| doing it for the poor people, you're doing it for God, and
| you did what was asked of you.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I think you missed the point of the Godel quote, though.
| dale_glass wrote:
| No, I just ignored it because it seemed irrelevant to the
| point I wanted to make.
|
| My intent was to disagree and say that no, EA isn't come
| sort of of rebranding of a Christian concept for people
| who dislike religion, but a fundamentally different thing
| altogether, with different mechanics and motivations.
|
| For that matter, atheists in general don't believe
| Christianity has any claim on charity, marriage or even
| Christmas.
| brutusborn wrote:
| Isn't it equivalent insofar as Christian conceptions of
| charity aren't prescriptive? Besides tithings, "love thy
| neighbour" or other Christian ideas can be interpreted in
| infinitely many ways, similar to EA.
|
| I think the morality of Christianity is the old-testament
| part and the charity/universal love is the New Testament
| part and thus more the focus of Christianity (obviously
| this depends on your particular sects interpretations of
| the scriptures).
| elzbardico wrote:
| EA is basically Rotary Club for rich and cool millenials.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Most computational linguists I know of hold disdainful views of
| Chomsky's work.
| eecc wrote:
| I think the ambitions and political views of Adriano Olivetti
| deserve to be included in this discourse.
|
| https://dicastri.club/2020/07/16/the-legacy-of-adriano-olive...
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I came to these comments for a summary, but stayed for the
| crazy...
| dade_ wrote:
| I find it interesting that the real problem we have in our world
| is technocrats (original definition: skill with power), yet we
| keep worrying about the made up redefinition of the term, rule
| made effective through technology (skill with knowledge). The
| people that are experts with power are far more dangerous,
| especially as we arm them with more and more technology.
|
| Wikipedia 'The term technocracy is derived from the Greek words
| tekhne, tekhne meaning skill and kratos, kratos meaning power, as
| in governance, or rule. William Henry Smyth, a California
| engineer, is usually credited with inventing the word technocracy
| in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective
| through the agency of their servants, the scientists and
| engineers", although the word had been used before on several
| occasions.'
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